Hortonworks collects $100m in funding for Hadoop ecosystem

Apache Hadoop solutions specialists
Hortonworks have earned themselves a tidy $100 million in their
latest funding round, led by US investment firms BlackRock and
Passport Capital.

Although last week rival Cloudera trumped the data
crunchers with $160 million worth of investments from T Rowe Price
and Google Ventures among others, Rob Bearden, Hortonworks’ chief
executive, isn’t splitting any hairs, noting that the round could
have been
much larger, and “quite honestly we don’t need it…we’ve run
the company with a lot of financial discipline”.

The California based company, which is a commercial
offshoot by the original Hadoop creators, has inked several
partnership deals in recent years, with collaborators including
Red Hat, the Apache Accumulo company
sqrrl and codecentric.
Last June, they raised $50 million to put towards growing global
field activities and amping up their engineering muscle.

According to the official press release, this latest
cash injection will go towards extending Hortonworks’ “strategy of
delivering Apache
Hadoop for the enterprise through leading innovation completely
in the open, through the continued expansion of the ecosystem and
through the expansion of global operations.”

In recent years, there’s been a huge shift in how
companies think about their big data, and Hadoop has played an
important role in this process, providing technology that
simplifies the intimidating task of scouring huge amounts of data
for meaningful analytics.

Recode.net reports that a recent IDC survey of 202 large
companies who had been toying with Hadoop discovered that nearly a
third of them had moved it to production environments, and around a
further third wanted to do so within a year or less. It may well be
that investors are sensing that a tipping point for uptake of
Hadoop in the enterprise is coming – and soon.

CEO Beardenhas said that this round of funding is the first step on
the company’s march towards the all important IPO, which it’s
speculated could happen as early as this year, or early
2015.